Monday, November 17, 2014

I'm going to hold myself hostage to fortune here.This week is the big WebRTC Expo event in San Jose in California. I'm moderating various panels and probably making a general nuisance of myself asking questions and picking everyone's brains about the trends they're seeing. But I'm going to risk making an analytical point in advance, and hope that the next 72 hours-worth of announcements don't make me look silly.One obvious talking point - and probably presentation point - is around Microsoft's strategy, given its support for ORTC and the recent announcement of Skype for Web. There's also no doubt going to be a lot of talk about video codecs, and the IETF's cleverly-crafted compromise position.But here, I just want to touch on something else. What exactly do the big ecosystem players want from voice/video/messaging, and how does that impact WebRTC? I've been stimulated by Tsahi's good analysis of the Skype/WebRTC plans, as it's made me realise something quite important:

Microsoft and Apple both seem to want to "own" certain aspects of communications services themselves, before throwing them open to all-comers via developer APIs.

Most obviously, Apple now has:

FaceTime Audio & Video for "calls"

Siri for voice-concierge capabilities

Video/voice messaging inside the current iMessage

iMessage itself for text messages

The upcoming walkie-talkie function in its Watch ("for a fun alternative to phone calls!")

Apple's push-notification service, which I think has the potential to seriously erode the A2P SMS market over time, especially if interactivity is enhanced

In other words, both companies seem to view communications at least as much in terms of potential for complete products, as they do in terms of platforms.Conversely, Google just has a few full-fledged communications applications:

Hangouts (including Google Talk)

Google Voice (US only)

Google Now & Voice Control

(And Firefox has just done a deal with Tokbox to integrate WebRTC conferencing into Firefox as "Hello") In other words, Apple and Microsoft are perhaps delaying WebRTC (or seem a bit ambivalent), in part because they want to cherry-pick certain voice/video use-cases for their own branded applications, adding value to hardware devices like phones, wearables and game consoles as well as directly monetising via their enterprise activities. Google seems less-concerned (or perhaps less-capable) of deriving revenue from communications products directly.It will be interesting to see if this week's WebRTC conference gives further weight and shape to this view.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

I’ve long railed against the telecoms industry term “OTT”,
standing for “over-the-top”. It is pointlessly divisive and
arbitrary, and often said in a pejorative fashion, by people who don’t
understand what it means and implies. On Twitter, I’ve often called for people using
the term OTT in a serious way to be summarily fired for gross incompetence by their employers. (Given that many of the worst offenders are themselves CEOs, this is impractical, unfortunately). I generally
prefix it with “so-called”, or use quote-marks, to give it the disrespect it
deserves.

“OTT” is used to describe a subset of Internet-based services
or applications, which are thought to compete with traditional telecoms
services like telephony and SMS, or hoped-for future services, such as IM or
video-calling. Skype, Whatsapp, LINE and SnapChat are examples of applications
which have earned the despised “OTT” tag, usually uttered by people whose PR
and legal departments told them not use stronger epithets.

None of those companies call themselves "OTT players" any more than a washing-machine manufacturer considers themselves as running over-the-top of the electricity supply. They are simply web or Internet companies, offering communication apps or services. Call them CSPs or some other acronym, if you must. In future, as "OTT" communications capabilities get absorbed into most applications and websites as features, with WebRTC or other APIs, it will be a fairly pointless distinction anyway.

There is also a considerably different interpretation in the
content space, where “OTT video” is used to describe channels or streaming
platforms such as Hulu and NetFlix or BBC iPlayer, which go direct-to-customer
and don’t need to work with normal digital TV aggregators such as cable MSOs or
IPTV platforms. There seems to be less animosity in that area among telcos, perhaps because most don't have legacy businesses there.

Some other Internet companies often get lumped into the “OTT”
category too, even though their main offerings don’t overlap with typical telecoms
service domains. Facebook and Google, for example, often get called OTTs simply
because they are seen as a strategic threat to the telecoms industry, so it
makes sense to demonise and caricature them as “the other”. Web search, social networking and online advertising are not traditional telecom businesses - they are new and purely Internet-based.

Most other
Internet services and applications don’t attract the same opprobrium. Nobody
calls Salesforce or Wikipedia or Tinder or a Cisco IP-PBXs & WebEx an “OTT service”,
even though they also “use our pipes for free”.

I’ve made the point in the past that if Internet services
are “over the top”, then surely telecoms networks are better-called “under the floor”, as that’s where the pipes and plumbing goes. Yet oddly enough, I don’t
encounter many telcos proudly declaiming their “UTF” status.

In a nutshell, "OTT" is simply a duplicitous, mealy-mouthed term for "bits of the Internet we don't like". "Dumb pipe" is a dumb term too - networks are neither pipes nor stupid. What "dumb pipe" means, translated from telco-ese, is "please tax the clever people for us, or let us do it instead".

I coined the term “Telco-OTT” in 2011, to describe the
growing phenomenon of telecom operators launching their own services that use the public Internet as a platform, rather
than their own managed network infrastructure. As well as grabbing attention,
it was intended to highlight the hypocrisy - and sometimes outright lies - of many industry executive and
observers (and sometimes regulators) when it comes to the Internet

Almost all Telcos have so-called OTT offerings, whether in
the field of voice/messaging, cloud offers, content/video or even home-automation.
These span both fixed and mobile networks, and “pure OTT” standalone
applications and “extension” models linked to existing on-net services. Some
are in-house developed, others created through partnerships. I identified well over 100 such services in 2011, and there are probably 200+ today.

And of course, every single telecoms company on the planet
has its own Internet-based website, gladly using other telcos’ networks as sales, marketing
and support channels for both their existing customers, and their rivals' subscribers they hope will switch. Vodafone.com, att.com and kddi.com are all “OTTs” in the
broad sense of the word. Of course, all the industry associations and
regulators happily make use of the public Internet as well, at the same time as
some are trying to limit its reach and scope.

Curiously, none of these telco-run Internet and app
properties have ever openly suggested paying for QoS on their rivals’ infrastructure,
or sponsoring their users’ data consumption. Surely, given Telefonica’s distaste of OTTs (”It's not a level playing field"), it would have proactively sought to recompense its rivals forced to
carry traffic from Terra, Tuenti or TuGo, as a good example? One would
have also thought that GSMA’s or ETNO’s webmasters would have long ago
volunteered to pay for visitors’ traffic, to demonstrate “innovative” broadband business models? Or perhaps Verizon would have sought to accelerate user transactions
on Verizon.com, when viewed from an AT&T broadband connection, and pleaded
with the FCC to allow it to buy a “fast lane”?

Oddly, all the CEOs conveniently overlook their own Internet businesses, when it comes to grandstanding in front the FCC or EU or investors, about Net Neutrality and similar issues.

The bottom-line: ALL
telcos are “OTTs”. All of them exploit the Internet, and would complain
bitterly if they were prevented from doing so. They’re not as successful in some areas as their
rivals, but that’s a separate discussion.

When telecom industry representatives clamour about the lack
of “a level playing field”, most are either ignorant, disingenuous, or
unwilling to confront the organisational and cultural blockages in their own
businesses. Plenty of telcos do launch run “pure
OTT” apps and services, in exactly the same fashion as any other firm. That
said, other telcos have limitations in areas such as user-data collection and
exploitation, and I'd support broader equivalency of laws and rules there, versus Internet players. It's up for discussion whether data privacy laws should be relaxed on telcos, or tightened on web firms.

Some also have actual – or merely perceived – regulatory hurdles on things like lawful intercept. But they have had 10 years to convince regulators and ministries to be more relaxed on communications areas outside of traditional telephony. Seriously, if an operator launches a karaoke app, are they expected to record hours of terrible singing, and metadata of the music tracks sung for the authorities? Instead, too many operators argue for new rules to be imposed on Internet companies, rather than arguing for relaxing rules on themselves.

The time has now come for me to retire the term "Telco-OTT". It is now in mainstream use, and various vendors and media outlets have come to embrace it more fully. The market has understood that telcos need to have web and mobile apps and services, decoupled from their own networks. WiFi-calling exploits third-party wireless connections. TV-anywhere apps use whatever networks are available. WebRTC services are quite clearly expected to be accessed from any Internet entry point. Many telco SaaS/cloud offers are accessible from anywhere. Numerous operators have VoIP apps intended for expats, travellers and the "diaspora" outside their home market, and away from their controlled and managed home networks.

Continuing with term Telco-OTT now just lends legitimacy to the unvarnished OTT label, and the phony war that is continually perpetuated by vendors and regulators in that regard. I want those that use the term OTT to be accused of blinkered "entitlement", as evidenced by ignorant comments about "OTT stealing revenues". Communications and content provision are open battlegrounds. Nobody is "entitled" to market share, revenues or profits for telecom and Internet services. They are up for competition. And if you offer Internet access to your customers, you should understand and accept the risk that Internet applications will be better/cheaper/cooler than on-net alternatives.

So what to call these services now that "Telco-OTT" is to be consigned to history?Easy. Let's just call them "Telco Apps" (or Telco-Apps with a hyphen - I'm open to persuasion on the punctuation). Certain things may have to be called Telco Platforms or Telco Enablers, if they are thin delaminated Internet service "slices" rather than full applications.I'm also calling time on "Digital Services". It's a stupid term as well. Apart from AM/FM radio, I can't think of any analogue communications services. They're all digital, as is the entirety of Internet & telecoms networking. As Alan Quayle often points out, "Digital" hasn't been a useful adjective since it was used to describe Casio watches in the 1970s, or perhaps the replacement of old phone exchanges in the 1980s. Today, "digital" is most often associated with techno-illiterate fools in the marketing and advertising industries, who talk about "digital marketing", or use cringeworthy phrases when you meet them like "Hi, I'm in digital".

So. "Telco-OTT" is dead, "OTT" is for telecom people who don't like the Internet but are too scared & hypocritical to say so as they use it too, and "Digital" is for people who haven't understood the last 50 years of technology.

Internet companies make apps, websites & Internet services. Telcos exploiting the Internet do the same. Telcos are Internet companies. Call their Internet activities Telco-Apps, if you need to distinguish them from network-integrated services - although even those will be extended over the Internet anyway. The Internet - and the Web & Apps - has won.Oh, and make sure you understand the difference between the Internet and the Web, too. Or else, once again, you should be fired for incompetence.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

There are numerous 5G-requirements/use-cases documents being
circulated by mobile vendors, industry bodies and governmental organisations.
For example, 4G Americas recently put out a top-level white paper listing a
variety of possible user- and network-functional options for consideration,
based on the expected devices and user scenarios.

There are some very sensible conclusions – such as limiting
the provision of complex mobility functions to those devices or contexts that
actually need them. There is no point having complex, expensive and
battery-consuming cellular mobility signalling protocols for IoT installations
that are at fixed locations, for example. This type of context-smart design,
built into the architecture upfront, could massively improve 5G efficiency and
flexibility. This is a big shift from the one-size-fits-all approach seen in 3G
and 4G design.

But, ultimately, many of the industry-issued papers are
trying to reset the future balance of application/context-aware networks, vs.
the growing trend towards network-aware applications. Coupled with hoped-for
regulatory frameworks that allow more app-specific network operation, the
intent is that mobile operators will retain a strategically important role with
additional monetisation opportunities.

In an ideal world, both philosophies would co-exist.
However, as the current concerns over net neutrality illustrate, there is
considerable fear that network operators could abuse their position, especially
in markets with limited access competition. There is a risk of oligopolistic
operators demanding rents from application or content companies, which are both
financially burdensome and act as a brake on innovation, by introducing extra
business-process friction.

The huge success of the Internet model has largely been
driven by the decoupling of application from network – and virtually no
developers appear to wish to go back to the “bad old days” where they had to
interact with the underlying infrastructure providers. Most would rather use a
generic “vanilla” data connection. Perhaps others will emerge – especially in
the IoT arena – that are prepared to pay for “priority” or “QoS”, but as yet
there have been no enthusiastic potential customers. There is a notable absence
of any lobbying group clamouring “please let us buy some extra QoS”, which
suggests the entire concept is network-push rather than application-pull.

There are other stakeholders here too – notably end-users, and
their employers, IoT infrastructure owners, families and other affiliated
groups. They will wish 5G to be as responsive to their needs as possible – especially in offering flexibility of
pricing/quality trade-offs. Furthermore, if networks are allowed to
differentially treat (or even block) specific applications or content, then
users will still want to be able to access those services through different
channels instead.

Disruptive Analysis believes that a possible solution is to
design 5G devices and networks with the explicit expectation that users should
always have access to at least two
completely independent network providers. This would allow users (or
devices / OS’s acting as their agents) to arbitrage between different sources
and styles of connectivity, as well as providing redundancy should one network
experience a problem.

To an extent, this already happens. Most cellular 3G/4G
devices also have user-controlled WiFi, which in many locations enables connectivity
completely decoupled from the cellular operator’s control. In addition,
short-range connections can be made over Bluetooth for certain use-cases,
including device-to-device connections. And of course, there are some devices
with dual SIMs or even dual radios. However, these are additions added by
manufacturers, and work against the
cellular industry’s polarised vision of “one device, one network operator”,
rather than being designed-in as desirable models upfront.

It is imperative that the current level of user control over
networking switching is maintained in the 5G era, and ideally extended
considerably. Firstly, extreme care must be taken in any “multi-network”
scenario to protect “seams”. There is a huge danger in trusting the concept of
“seamlessness”, as often promoted by believers in carrier WiFi technologies
like ANDSF, Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint. While there are instances where
automatic handover is useful, there must always remain a user-override and full
visibility over which networks are used. This is especially true where one network
is in unlicensed bands, as there will be a good chance that a
cheaper/better/different network operator is available locally. This is often
the case today with WiFi, where many locations are free at the point of use,
and private access of utility WiFi (not “offload”) allows users to avoid using
data plans, and perhaps avoid any onerous policy-management conditions their cellular
provider imposes.

But ideally, this approach would go much further. Explicitly
mandating devices to support at least two cellular network providers – where one
might be virtual (e.g. with a Soft-SIM or second SIM or other
network-authentication mechanism) would introduce extra competition, innovation
capabilities and user/app choice at an architectural level. It would encourage
networks to compete sincerely on quality and performance, as they would face
easier switching. Applications and OS’s would be able to avoid “bad actor”
rent-seeking operators by choosing an alternative path – and this in turn would
make concepts such as prioritisation more palatable, as it would act to “keep
the networks honest”. It would also make the distorting effects of handset
subsidies much less tenable – which fits in with a broader move towards cellphone
financing plans, rather than direct subsidy and locking.

A related approach is to make sure that device-to-device
connections are decoupled from the cellular operator(s) entirely, and not
locked-in to the user’s normal data plan. That way, users and their software
agents will be able to “route around” over-restrictive or expensive operator controls,
by using others’ connections instead. We already see this with portable-hotspot
WiFi tethering, but more generalised and user-friendly forms of “social
tethering” can be devised. It is quite plausible to imagine “sharing my
connection with my Facebook friends”, or perhaps having separate, independent,
D2D service providers.

Apple’s SIM card, with its selectable mobile networks, is a
good step in the right direction here, but care must be taken to avoid anointing
Apple or Google as another single point of network control as well.

A further possibility here is to apply strict Net Neutrality
to just one of the connections. That
way, the user always has open access to all legal apps and services via the
public Internet, but the other connection(s) could support alternative business
models, if they prove technically and commercially viable. Indeed, the user might
choose to purchase both Internet and non-Internet service connections, and thus
allow non-neutral connections to prove their “more innovation and investment”
credentials over time.

Overall, 5G requirements and standards should support switchable,
multi-network capabilities, using independent service providers, with at least
one neutral Internet connection. By mandating this:

Users and applications can always exercise
choice over network connections and pick “the best tool for the job at hand”

Full and open Internet access is always
available, but so are other potential “managed” services which can compete
directly and fairly.

Innovative solutions involving network bonding,
roaming, D2D sharing and other models will be encouraged. We may see the
emergence of new classes of secondary network service-providers.

WiFi or other unlicensed technologies remain
valuable as an “arbitrage layer”. We may see the emergence of unlicensed-band
LTE/5G networks run by third parties.

Regulators can manage to “square the circle” of
guaranteeing both consumer choice, open Internet access and the potential for new mobile broadband business models.

There can be good fits with new MVNO or
liberalised-MNC models for network service provision.

All that said, it seems unlikely that the traditional mobile
industry will suggest this approach itself, as the usual model tends to view
lock-in as preferable to loyalty and choice. It will be important for
regulators and other stakeholders (eg Apple which is now a member of NGMN) to
push for multi-network capabilities to be recognised as a 5G requirement. This
is a critical area, which seems to be overlooked at the moment. 5G needs not
just “seams”, but “zips” that allow it to be more open, more versatile, and of
greater benefit and value to the user.

Monday, November 10, 2014

It's very easy to get caught up in "what's next". I spend a lot of time predicting the future of communications: apps/web-embedded voice and video (usually with WebRTC), new forms of enterprise collaboration & conferencing, Internet-based communications services (the ignorants in the industry still call them "OTTs" - they should be fired for incompetence) and so on.But what is actually happening back in the real-world of good old phone calls and SMSs? We hear a lot about possible revenue declines (or revenue "stolen" by OTTs - ignoramuses again) as well as some bright spots like application-to-person messaging growing. But what about usage? While I disagree with the continued myopic focus on minutes and message volumes for the future, there is no doubting that those metrics still form the basis of many telecom industry mindsets.I'm moderating a work-stream at TADSummit in Istanbul this week, about innovation in legacy services. While a lot of that concerns value-adds and APIs, some of it is going to look at innovative ways to encourage use of phone calls and SMS/MMS. So, bringing this to life a bit, I thought I'd do a quick scan of reported numbers by operators and regulators on what they're actually seeing in terms of usage. It should be noted that there's always definitional complexities here, so comparison between countries might not be perfect. There's some fuzziness in areas like corporate VoIP and SIP-trunking too. However, trends over time should be indicative. I'm also constrained by what I can find quickly & easily in English - which tends to push me towards European regulators, which generally have hard-working stats departments and accessible publications.First, Ofcom in the UK. In a report published in August 2014

SMS/MMS volumes fell 24% in 2013 vs. 2012

Total outgoing fixed+mobile voice minutes fell by
3.9% in 2013. Total outgoing fixed voice call volumes
fell by 10.7%, while mobile-originated minutes increased by 1.4%. (Interestingly, the mobile growth reversed an earlier decline - perhaps because of the growth of unlimited bundles)

35% of UK adults used VoIP services in Q1 2014

In Spain:

Mobile voice minutes grew 11% in the year to Q2'2014. Again, there had been a fall in 2012-2013, but it is now rebounding. Fixed minutes decline 18%, however

SMS/MMS volumes in Q2'2014 were down 32% on the previous year, and are now 82% lower than at their peak in Q2'2007

In Germany

Fixed minutes declined 3% in 2013, and mobile grew by just 1%. Unlike most countries however, fixed usage is still about 60% higher than mobile, so it is past the point of overall "peak telephony"

SMS volumes seem to have fallen in 2013 based on the chart in this report, but the text says the number increased by 13%.

In the US

Mobile voice minutes grew 14% in 2013

SMS volumes fell 13% in 2013

Other stats from a brief scan:

Canadian SMS/MMS volumes fell 4% in 2013

Chinese SMS volumes fell 18% in the period Jan-May 2014 vs. the previous year. Local mobile minutes grew 2.3% in that period, but at a substantially lower rate then the previous year

For China Mobile specifically, voice minutes grew 3% in 2013 although average use fell about 5%. SMS fell about 1.5%

NTT DoCoMo's overall mobile telephony minutes fell by 5% in FY2013

MTN Group (mostly active in Africa) had a 19% increase in voice minutes in 2013

SingTel telephony average MoU fell 6% in the year to March 2014, and SMS volume per-subscriber fell 30%

Overall, it seems pretty clear that there are multiple overlapping trends here, often driven by local competitive/pricing issues, as well as some cultural factors.

Firstly, it seems as though prepaid users (on pay-as-you-go plans) are much more likely to switch to Whatsapp, Skype and similar services to directly save money. This makes sense - if you pay per-message, there a direct and clear incentive to look for alternatives. Secondly, markets with all-inclusive telephony and messages seem to see volume usage improve. I suspect that this is partly due to pent-up demand from people who previously saw communications as expensive/variable-cost, and partly because when something is "free" people sometimes use more than they need, to perceive "value" (think buffet food...).

There is also...

...the chance that...

...SMS use switches to IM-style phrases...

:-)

... when users have unlimited messages, especially coupled to a good smartphone-type device with well-threaded and scrollable messaging interface and a decent keypad/touchscreen.

The aggregate numbers of fixed+mobile calls seem to demonstrate that many markets are now past "peak telephony", although they do not capture all the call-equivalent VoIP services around. There does appear to be a clear peak of calling volumes in affluent markets with a lot of post-paid contracts, however. Watching 2014 data will give an indication of whether people really are now "talking less", as certain use-cases get carved off by competing apps or complete substitutes.

The data sets we don't have are "usage by purpose". Are calls growing longer or shorter? To a greater number of contacts or fewer? From certain locations, or particular applications? For example, maybe there are more long calls (conferences, calls to family etc) but fewer B2C interactions or short "information calls" (eg arranging meetings). The lack of analytical insight into the voice telephony and SMS market make it hard to discern the inner details of the macroscopic trends.

Taking everything together, there appear to be a few general observations that can be made:

Not everyone is "bored" with telephony yet, especially in mobile. It's also still not that easy to replace with VoIP on smartphones.

SMS is facing both huge pricing pressure and people switching for both price and utility/function reasons. Volumes may not tell the whole story.

We have not yet seen a major shift toward in-app / in-context comms for voice communications.

More granular detail would be good, as otherwise important trends may get "lost in the noise" as pricing plan changes and other factors swamp and hide the initial stages of market evolution.

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Tomorrow, I'm speaking at the inaugural "Great Telco Debate", run by Chris Lewis and Graham Wilde, and focusing on big-picture strategy issues for network operators. Also on the roster are various other long-time analysts and telecom industry commentators, including people I've known for years such as Pim Bilderbeek, Benoit Felten, Caroline Gabriel and my regular colleague / Twitter protagonist Martin Geddes. Next week, I'm running a track at Alan Quayle's TADSummit event, as well, which is aimed at creating a telecoms application development community.The common theme here is independence. Chris, Martin, Alan, Caroline, Benoit, Pim and our peers have all worked for larger companies, typically analysis or consulting firms. We now run our own gigs, sometimes on our own, sometimes with partners or associates on a tactical basis. The Great Telco Debate features a host of independent analysts.All of us are outspoken. In fact, Chris has called his conference company "Outspoken Events". All of us have a track record of being right - not always, not everywhere, but with a far better level of accuracy than many in the analyst industry. (Alan and Martin refuse to be called analysts, in fact - reflecting the dubious quality of some punditry in the telecoms sector).Yet while organisations like the IIAR give some airtime to those of us lower down the size scale from the behemoths like Gartner and IDC, this recognition and engagement is patchy. Today I'm with Ericsson in Stockholm, with a number of other independent or small-firm peers. Despite my regular criticism of some technologies and strategies, it's a company that seems to appreciate a diversity of opinion. I was speaking at a Metaswitch customer event on Tuesday, another vendor which goes beyond the "big guys". Last week, I took part in some hosted events for groups of investors, organised by my financial-analyst telecom-sector counterparts at Barclays, who like bringing in experts on particular topical themes - in this case, I was discussing Apple's SIM card and its implications.

However, some other vendors, operators, regulators, enterprise end-users and broader ecosystem participants often do not look beyond the largest names, like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Infonetics, 451/Yankee, Informa, ABI, AnalysysMason and their peers. While I'm not denigrating those companies, they tend to be less contrarian, less prone to risky visions that might prove wrong, and more willing to repeat industry "standard" mantras. Look back at years of hype and hockey-stick curves about RCS, mobile payments, mobile TV, the spurious tabloid-headline "battle vs. the OTTs" and so on. Identify the cheerleaders and the critics.

There have usually been a few small boys pointing out the naked emperors, but only rarely do they come from the large firms. On the other side, few of the bigger houses are adept at spotting or predicting the next thing either, as their structure makes it hard to spot cross-silo trends. My own claimed scalps have included highlighting the potential of small cells, WiFi offload, WebRTC and Telco-OTT before any other analyst. Martin Geddes and I championed "the future of voice" long before it became a trend.The problem is that much of the "analyst" world is aimed at enterprise IT, where "influence" is all-important and easier to discern and isolate - much of it is directly about buyers choosing between vendors in specific categories of IT. The telecoms part of the analyst business is different, as the buyers are largely themselves in the technology industry as well. The role of standards - which may well be slow to evolve or plain wrongly-focused - is much higher in telecoms and networking, than in enterprise computing, applications and IT. Willingness to criticise standards, as well as companies, is important. My view and aspiration (yes, it's self-serving too) is that companies in the telecoms industry should restrict their industry research budget to a maximum of 50% spend on the generic, "standardised" options from the big analyst houses. The rest - just as with telecoms R&D spend on new technologies, platforms and services - needs to go to innovative and disruptive thinkers, whether that's in the form of traditional research reports, or more workshop/brainstorm forms of engagement and provocation.

You don't need to agree with us. And you might not want to use our output to give stats for your "rubber-stamp" internal business plans, or press releases hyping the next (failure-inevitable) thing. But you do need true independent thoughts to really catalyse change. Service innovation has largely failed in telecoms - it has been too "consensus" driven, too political, too slow and too rooted in engineering mentality rather than design. You don't often get told painful truths by the larger firms - they tend to pull their punches. "Anti-forecasting" what won't happen is as important as predicting what will - opportunity costs are increasing in the Internet era, so fruitless quests need to be spotted early and abandoned.

To spot opportunities, and painful problems, you need blue-sky thinking and contrarian musing, and practical, real-world advice on creating "the new". You need to spot the second-order problems before the first-order ones are fixed, or else you'll add in years of additional cycles and time-to-market. You need to know when to push back against industry organisations and standards bodies, and when to steer them in particular directions if possible. You need to make sure that your CEO avoids trite sound-bites and questionable statistics. You need someone who'll tell you that correlation and causation are different.I list below some of the companies that fall into the independent analyst category. These are ones where I know the principles in real life or interact with them online. People who are opinionated, and able to challenge the status quo and consensus view. There are plenty more where I don't know the specific individuals. Some of them compete with me, but I think it's important to recognise the collective wisdom and insight of the independent analyst community, and so I'm happy to name-check them here.

And of course, there's my own company Disruptive Analysis (yes, I know the website is awful.... when I have time I'll sort it...). If you're reading this blog, you probably already know me - I'm called @disruptivedean for a reason.The bottom line is this: the telecoms industry cannot afford just to read, or hear about, consensus views, from a handful of big firms saying much the same thing. Diversity of opinion, vision, concern and suggestion is paramount. Telcos, vendors and others all need a breadth of inputs. Assigning at least 50% of industry research budget to independent, flexible thinkers is a good metric to aim for, to help attain this. We may not have a collective voice or slick sales and marketing machines - but that's because we don't want to have to feed the machine with generic output.

Disruptive Analysis Workshops

- Mobile broadband traffic management strategies- Technology and market evolution- Business model development & unique propositions- Pre-launch feedback on new products and services- Business plan due diligence- Leadership team development